Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A report issued by the United States Government Accountability Office on June 6 confirms a trend of the educational publishing industry: textbook costs to students at higher education institutions are rising 6% per year on average, and have risen 82% over the last decade. The study, ordered by Congress, looks at the efforts of publishers and colleges to increase the availability of textbook price information and "unbundled" buying options as required under provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA). The GAO also interviewed faculty regarding benefits of this transparency and offering of new options for students purchasing course materials.

When running Fedora 19 with its updated open-source Linux graphics drivers, 15 different Intel, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs were compared when looking at the open-source Linux OpenGL performance. The tested graphics processors span from the Intel HD Graphics 4600 "Haswell" integrated graphics to the AMD Radeon HD 7950 "Southern Islands" graphics card to the vintage Radeon X1800XL.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appears to be ramping up for an investigation of Patent Assertion Entity (PAE) practices. In a noteworthy, welcome development, FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez recently gave a significant policy speech outlining a roadmap for possible FTC action. Chairwoman Ramirez’s remarks are some of the most direct and specific to date from a senior US Government official regarding "harmful PAE activities," and follow on in more detail the concerns laid out by President Obama last February.

The Linux Mint project and CompuLab announced an updated version of their MintBox mini-PC, which comes with Linux Mint pre-installed. The MintBox 2 switches to a faster Intel Core i5 processor, doubles the storage to a 500GB HDD, adds a second gigabit Ethernet port, and bumps the price up to $599.

With Fedora 19 presenting a nice "out of the box" experience for AMD Radeon HD 7000 series graphics using the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, benchmarks of the open-source driver were done and compared to previous generations of AMD hardware. Sadly, there's still much work ahead for the Radeon HD 7000 series driver in being able to catch up with the hardware supported under the mature R600 Gallium3D driver.

With Thursday's announcement that Mir will ship by default in Ubuntu 13.10 on the desktop, many Ubuntu users were caught by surprise that this experimental display server will be ready by October. Up to now, Ubuntu 13.10 was expected to continue using an X.Org Server by default on the desktop (with only an experimental option for Mir) while the new Ubuntu Touch project would be using Mir on mobile devices, until next year. With the pressed timeline for the migration to Mir, at Phoronix we have already carried out our first Mir benchmarks. In this article are the first benchmarks of Intel graphics when running on Ubuntu 13.10 with a native X.Org Server (as done now on current Ubuntu Linux releases) and then when deploying the same Unity desktop environment atop XMir with the Mir unity-system-compositor.

Dot Categories: KDE Official NewsThe second beta of the 4.11 releases of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform is available. The beta 2 release announcement has highlights, links to release details and download instructions. The development focus is on bug fixing, polishing and general stabilization.

“Knowledge is Power,” said James Broughton. Oh, I know I’m going to catch flack for that quote, - it was Sir Francis Bacon, or Thomas Hobbes, depending upon how technical you want to get. However, this is a post about children and growing up to be future techies. So I’ll regale you with a little story before we get started. James of the ‘famous’ quote above is my father. One day, back in the early 90’s before I ventured into the tech world (and before I realized that Sir Francis Bacon said ‘knowledge is power’), my father and I were having a discussion over knowledge, power, opportunity and making it in the real world. He never directly quoted anyone at the time, but that one phrase he told me stuck with me my entire teenage life and throughout everything I do today : “Knowledge is Power”.

Mint is a relative newcomer to the world of popular desktop distros, but it has recently started to take the GNOME and Unity-hating Linux world by storm. The recent release of version 15, called Olivia, should help it secure a reputation as “the” alternative desktop. If you'd like a modern set of desktop tools without a completely new desktop interface to go with, then Mint 15 has what you're after.

Dot Categories: Community and EventsThis Akademy keynote talk is based on Jolla and their Sailfish OS. It will cover project history, software architecture and collaboration between Jolla and various open source projects such as Qt, Mer, and Nemo Mobile. It will address the user interface concepts used in Sailfish OS and highlight the benefits of using Qt Quick to build the user experience in Sailfish OS.

Wind River has announced a KVM-based virtualization extension to Wind River Linux designed for the telecom industry. The Wind River Open Virtualization Profile offers an open source, real-time kernel virtualization platform that features CPU isolation and under 3-second latency, and supports future network functions virtualization (NFV) standards, says Wind River.

Sony revised its Android-based SmartWatch with a higher-resolution, water resistant SmartWatch 2 model featuring NFC sync and a longer-lasting battery. The 1.6-inch SmartWatch 2 was announced two weeks after the company open-sourced the Android firmware for the original SmartWatch.

Password and credit-card details leak online every day. So no one really knows just how much personally identifiable information is available by clicking on the right link to Pastebin, Pastie, or similar sites. Using a platform that runs on the hobbyist Raspberry Pi platform to drink from this fire hose, a security researcher has cataloged more than 3,000 such posts in less than three months while adding scores more each week.

Mozilla and National Science Foundation announce winning Gigabit apps from the Mozilla Ignite Challenge What’s possible on an internet without speed limits? What new applications can developers dream up when they’re able to move data at lightning speed? Today, Mozilla … Continue reading

Garmin announced a ruggedized, 4-inch personal navigation device (PND) that runs on Android. Expected to ship in the third quarter starting at $650, the handheld Monterra offers Google Play compatibility, a dual-band GPS/GLONASS receiver, a 3-axis compass, an 8-megapixel camera, and wireless features including WiFi, ANT+, Bluetooth 3.0, NFC, FM, and NOAA radios, and a sunlight-readable display.

Freeloaders: helpful or hurtful? Concerns are raised every once in a while in the broader free and open source software community about freeloaders. The attitude expressed is that if you're getting the benefit of FOSS, you should contribute. Building a business on a FOSS project you don't own, whether you're providing a service or product around a FOSS project should in return garner some sort of quid pro quo. In reality, freeloaders are desirable.

Earlier this month, Facebook officially announced its implementation of hashtags, prompting both celebration and outcry from users. But the event also sparked a spate of critical analyses addressing the nature of conversations today, as well as the ways technologies facilitate and organize even the most banal ones. Love them or hate them, hashtags have become an overwhelmingly popular convention for pursuing those recurring questions: What's going on right now? And how should we make sense of it?

Have you compared debuggers lately? Until recently, I'd been programming using only one debugger — the one supplied by my compiler vendor. Suddenly, with a new job programming on Linux, I find the range of choices in debuggers is dizzying. Wikipedia lists 18 GUI front ends for GDB alone. This article is the result of my effort to choose a debugger with a good GUI front end for my first UNIX/Linux job in several years.

Leszek Godlewski, the developer behind the Linux port of Painkiller: Hell & Damnation, gave a talk a few months ago about bringing games to Linux. The presentation was given at the Digital Dragons 2013 European Games Festival, but the slides and video recording are available and are quite interesting.

Samsung unveiled a quad-core, 20-megapixel Galaxy NX camera with 4G LTE and a 4.8-inch display, billed as being the first Android-based, connected interchangeable-lens camera, following up on last week’s announcement of its Android-powered 16-megapixel, 10x-zoom Galaxy S4 Zoom. Also today, Samsung unveiled the Ativ Q, a dual-boot 13.3-inch convertible tablet that runs Android and Windows 8 on an Intel “Haswell” Core processor.